Anorexia

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Teenage eating desorders
Nowadays the most promoted image on TV, magazines, posters is the super slim model. Teenagers are very concerned about how they look and they try to get the so-called "perfection" no matter what. Therefore they take many measures to loose weight. Often the desire becomes an obsession and this thing has many bad effects on their health developing eating disorders. Firstly, either is anorexia, bulimia or compulsive eating, they all are serious health problem. While anorexia means an irrational fear of getting fat and diets to the point of starvation, bulimia is the opposite: a person who eats large quantities of food and then makes herself throw up, takes laxatives, or uses other ways to avoid gaining weight. A compulsive eater eats large quantities of food, or binges, even when not physically hungry. Secondly, there are many reasons that can contribute to the cause of eating disorders. One of the main reasons seems to be the obsession over the weight. Moreover, low self-esteem, depression, family problems, discomfort with a changing body, uncertainty over society’s views of women, and psychological or social traumas such as sexual abuse can cause the eating disorder too. Thirdly, not only does eating disorders affect the body, it can also affect the social life. People with these problems can loose more weight than what they intended. So, their body will loose the necessary power for daily activities. In addition, family problems may develop. Sometimes parents may blame themselves because they feel they are responsible for their children problems. Facing eating disorder can ruin people's social life by affecting their relationship with closed ones. In conclusion, I consider that we must be aware at people with such problems and help them. When helping someone, is important to be positive and supportive because people with eating disorder have very low self-esteems.They have to understand that it isn't necessary to be thin so that they could be succesful and admirated by the others. Oprah for example, isn't thin and yet she is the richest women in America and she is loved by many people. So, although the recovery process may take time and hard work, eating disorders can be overcome.

Vocabulary: to abduct ( a rapi) = to take someone away from their home, family,etc.using force: He was abducted at gunpoint. muddle ( talmes- balmes) = a confused situation or condition: Her feelings for him are such a muddle. to delve ( a cerceta ) = to look for information by searching throug something thoroughly: This biography delves deep into the artist's private life. Bibliography: ***http://www.eatingdisordershelpguide.com/effects.html

Article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/14/anorexia-eatingdisorders-parenting Emily, her anorexia and me The greatest challenge for the parent of a child with an eating disorder is holding onto the person in the grip of the disease Sue Blackmore and her daughter, Emily Troscianko, as they are today. Photograph: Adam Hart-Davis I have my daughter back – after 10 long years. She wasn't kidnapped or abducted; she didn't run away. She had anorexia. This must surely be one of the most awful, drawn-out miseries for any parent; to watch your own beloved child starving herself to death. And yes, they are mostly "her", not "him". It all started when Emily was nearly 16 and discovered the pleasure of feeling hungry. On a lone Eurorail trip that summer, she ate very little and came home looking very thin. Even then, I didn't twig. I suppose, like many mothers, I didn't think this incomprehensible, stupid, selfish and horrible illness could ever beset my lovely family. When Emily stopped eating properly at home, and the school began to worry, I did finally realise and tried to get help. But what can you do? Of course, I began reading. One website begins "Anorexia statistics are grim" (thanks). They are indeed. Ninety per cent of anorexics are women and most begin restricting their eating in adolescence. Most suffer for years or even decades thereafter, with about 10% dying within 10 years, and 20% within 20 years. Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. Only about 40% ever fully recover. Emily, it seems, is one of those.

Treatment is available, but not very successful. There are many stories of young women going in and out of hospital many times before finally dying, and almost none describing the successes of psychiatry or therapy. As I quickly learned, anorexics don't want to get "better"; don't think they need "treatment", and (at least, at first) enjoy the sense of power, control and superiority over others that their chosen way of life seems to bring them. Emily went to a helpful NHS child psychiatrist for many months, but the day she reached 18, she was no longer eligible to see him, and as parents we could no longer insist on her having "help" she did not want. One useful experience for me was a day seminar for carers laid on by the local Eating Disorder Unit. As I walked into the lecture room, I was overwhelmed by a palpable sense of despair. Almost everyone there looked drawn, depressed, frantic or desperately tired. As the day went on, I heard stories of wrecked families, parents who had spent weeks in hospital with a child, ones who had tried bribery and threats, and some who had given up their jobs – indeed, their whole lives – to care for their child. None of this seemed to have helped in any way. I also heard evidence showing that families with an anorexic member usually become dysfunctional after their child becomes anorexic, not before, which greatly eased my incipient guilt. Above all, I thought, "If these parents are doing all this and it makes no odds, then I am not so bad for just carrying on with my own life, my own research, my own job." So that's (mostly) what I did. Periodically, Emily's father and I tried to intervene, but any effects were temporary. Both Emily's father and brother suggested I should throw Emily out of the house, but I couldn't bring myself to do that – and anyway, everything I had read suggested that it wouldn't help and that she'd just go on starving herself somewhere else instead. So we just muddled miserably on. By the time she was 26, Emily was a wraith. She was so thin that hugging her was like clasping a rattling skeleton. Her skin was broken and grey, her eyes stuck out unnaturally, and her arms and legs looked like bones with skin on. Her presence in the house might have been the inspiration for Harry Potter's dementors; somehow, all the warmth and energy of everyone else seemed to be sucked out of us while she was around. Amazingly, she kept working, took a first in Modern Languages at Oxford, and went on to do a PhD there, too. She ate alone, late at night, and seemed to have nothing in her life apart from her academic work and her secret food rituals. What kind of a life is that? Yet she insisted it gave her more pleasure than anything we "ordinary" people could have. So what changed? If you read the Daily Mail, you'll get the impression that it was "tough love". ABC News has it that "Mom discovers when to be tough", but I didn't see it that way; nor did Emily, as she explains in her anorexia blog. In fact, several incidents came together to precipitate the change. Perhaps most important was that my partner, Adam, and I were moving house. We'd lived in my house in Bristol

for 15 years with Emily and her brother, Jolyon; their father lived nearby. But now, we were moving out of the city down to Devon to a new home of our own. Jolyon was living in Birmingham and Emily, I thought, in Oxford. But as we visited and discussed our new home, it became ever clearer to me that Emily was imagining it would be her home, too. I realised how very much I did not want that wraith and that misery to come with us on this big move, how unfair it would be for Adam, who had endured and helped with so much pain over all those 10 long years, and how inappropriate it seemed for a young woman of 28 to be thinking of her parent's home as her own, rather than as a place to visit for holidays and weekends. All this came out in a conversation in the car one day. I was glad I was driving because we couldn't look at each other and I felt very awkward, which was not like me. Emily and I, through all those years, had remained close and often talked about her anorexia. Indeed, one of the weirdest things about it all was her apparently clear insight, her ability to describe exactly what she was doing, and explain quite clearly why starving and being in control were preferable to living the way most people did. Just a day or two later, I found myself on the phone feeling even more awkward, and she detected my hesitation. "What's the matter?" she asked. And out it came. I did not plan this, or have any idea that I was going to say it. "I think what I'm trying to say, Emily, is that your anorexia is not welcome at our new house." "I thought that's what you meant," she said, and quickly changed the subject. But this one comment proved to be a turning point. It wasn't the Daily Mail's "tough love", nor, I think, was it quite as Emily described, that I'd run out of options. It was probably more like selfishness and straightforward honesty. I'd had enough of all this misery. I was shocked at my own words. But then, I began to think about where they'd come from. The books always tell you to try to separate the anorexia from the person who is suffering from it. The anorexic will tell you that she is her anorexia; that she wouldn't be herself if she ate like other people do, as "fat" and "greedy" people do. I had never tried to follow the books' advice, but I guess that was somewhere in the back of my mind. I wanted my Emily back! And back she came. From there it was a long haul, but one helped by two further events. First, when she went back to university after the Easter holidays, a friend of hers realised for the first time that she was anorexic. Totally surprised, this friend stopped work and spent several days doing nothing but researching anorexia and then persuading Emily first, to go to her own doctor and second, to enrol on a research programme comparing

two methods of CBT treatment for eating disorders taking place right there in Oxford. When I saw Emily a couple of months after this, she had been to the hospital for one visit but had not dared to sign up. She asked me to accompany her to a second visit, which, of course, I was delighted to do. And how fascinating it was. The therapist there spent most of the hour with Emily before calling me in to explain that although Emily was definitely suffering from anorexia, her BMI was too low for her to be admitted onto the programme. They had ethical approval to take only people with a BMI between 15 and 19. Emily's was less than 14. "That's ridiculous," protested Emily. "You mean I'm too thin to go on a programme supposed to make thin people fatter!" "Yes" was the reply, and the therapist explained that Emily's condition was so dangerous that she should not even be walking about, but ought to be in hospital; as therapists, not medically trained, they could not be responsible for someone that ill. With no obvious confidence in the proposal, she suggested that if Emily really wanted to enter treatment, then she had to put on 6lb by their cut-off date, seven weeks later. Since a pound a week is realistically the most one can gain, this meant she had seven weeks to put on 6lb – some challenge. But perhaps it was that very challenge that made the difference, or perhaps Emily, too, had had enough of it all; or perhaps – as in so many addictions – she had seen the writing on the wall. It was now eat or die. Whatever it was, Emily decided to eat. Another friend from her school days stepped in. He took her to the supermarket when she could not cope with buying previously forbidden food, helped her plan new ways of eating, and stayed with her while she did so. I was not there. I do not know what difficulties and setbacks it all entailed, but I know that she succeeded. She put on those 6lb, entered the programme and, from then on, steadily gained in weight and health and strength. As the therapists predicted, her awful symptoms began to drop away almost precisely along the graph of weight gain that they showed us at the start. Her activities pie chart, which once showed only "work" and "food", was now filling up with friends, outings, activities and all the other things that fill a healthy life. It seems that no deep psychological delving or awful psychoanalysis was relevant at all; the programme was all about weight gain and finding more to life than (lack of) food. Now, about 18 months later, Emily is happy, healthy and a normal weight. She has a job, a boyfriend and, above all, a life. People ask me why I am apparently so confident that she is over the anorexia when the statistics remain so terrifyingly bad. My answer is that I am only going on what Emily herself tells me. She once said that she had "done anorexia" so well – sticking for years to her rigid rules and almost dying in the process – that she had no incentive to do it all over again. During her recovery, she once said, as though the thought surprised her, that she was still "Emily" without her anorexia. That's how deeply entwined the person and the illness

become. For me, she was less and less Emily as she wasted away – and at last, she's back. I don't think this story holds out any recipe for success, but both of us hope it may speak to others stuck in anorexia's grip. It can end.

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